On a recent trip back to Tokyo, I caught the cheap-game fever again, exploring more boxes full of 100-yen castoffs in stores like Mandarake and Trader. There were so many deals that I just kept going, ending up with 25 games total.

Here are the titles I dug up for less than a dollar a game during my annual pilgrimage to Akihabara. Some were legitimately good, but I probably should have spent my money on five Mega Macs.

Above:

Castle Excellent, Daiva and Hissatsu! Dojo Yaburi

First up: Three duds for the 8-bit Nintendo Famicom, released in 1983 (and known as the NES in these parts). “Hey,” said a friend as I was picking up Castle Excellent, “you could always do the old game-journalist thing and say, ‘Castle Excellent isn’t so excellent after all.'”

Which it is not. It’s a platform game where you explore a castle, killing enemies and opening doors and such, but mostly you die while listening to music that makes you want to set your eardrums on fire. You might know it as Castlequest.

Daiva is a downgraded version of a PC shooter that actually looks pretty OK. This version, meanwhile, sucks. There is an interesting feature that lets you select areas on each level’s map where you want to deploy power-up items and air strikes, letting you place them for maximum effectiveness. But that’s the only thing that struck me as interesting.

And then there’s Hissatsu! Dojo Yaburi (“Sure Kill! Dojo Challenge”). A dojo yaburi is when somebody shows up at a karate dojo and challenges everybody in the place to a series of fights. Somebody should have done that with this game’s developer.

Dough Boy and Debias

Many of the earliest games for the Famicom resemble the sort of thing you’d play on the Atari 5200. Dough Boy certainly falls into that category. 1up called it one of the five worst Famicom games ever. You’re supposed to be infiltrating an enemy base. Or something. Apparently you can finish the game in three minutes, if you are so inclined.

Debias is better, but not by much. I started out in a forest and saw a crazy old dude in an evil green cloak — so I killed him. Then the king of the town refused to help me, because I was killing his civilians. Whoops! I focused my energies on the monsters thereafter, but couldn’t be bothered to save their stupid kingdom after about half-an-hour of trying to jump over some bats in a poorly designed cave. Guess they’ll all just have to live with it.

Asmik-Kun World and March of the 66 Alligators

The mascot of the game company Asmik is a little pink dragon named Asmik. I’m pretty sure I remember the company having a U.S. contest in which fans could write in to rename the character. Anyway, his first game — released here as Boomer’s Adventure in Asmik World — sucked. I played this for quite a while and I forget what I even did. Wikipedia says I was digging holes and luring enemies into them. I guess that happened.

I had a lot more fun with the next game, an excellent pinball title released stateside as Revenge of the Gator. Created by HAL Laboratory — probably under the direction of current Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, although I can’t find any credits anywhere — it’s a classic of the genre, an addictive pinball game crawling with alligators. It’s pretty sweet, and also hot, especially for 100 yen.

Times of Lore and Aigina’s Prediction

In the ancient times of lore, before people had fully developed all their various modern-day body parts, they kind of shuffled around funnily. And fought skeletons. That’s the history lesson I got from the Famicom version of classic Origin Systems role-playing game Times of Lore.

I don’t know what I was supposed to get out of Aigina’s Prediction, unless the prediction was that I was about to play a bad game. So I’m in this dungeon, right? And there are these monsters. To kill them, I had to hit blocks with my head, creating weapons that shot projectiles when I touched them. This turns out to be too clever by half. Even Castle Excellent got a U.S. release: This one was just beyond the pale.

Cameltry

This Super Famicom game was the only 100-yen title I found that came complete with its box and manual. Usually, it’s the lack of packaging that makes these things cheap. In this case, I don’t know why it was so inexpensive. Maybe the store manager was freaked out by the camel and wanted it out of his shop.

Kenji Kaido, producer of Ico, worked on Cameltry. You’ve probably played some variant of it — you rotate a maze, guiding a ball through it. Taito released an updated version called Labyrinth on the Nintendo DS, and this version made it to the United States as On the Ball. It’s pretty fun, and is thus the second game in this list to be worth the 100 yen.
It’s easy to spend a lot of time staring at the box art. Look at the expression on the camel’s face! The way he studies the ball! The ball’s bizarre trajectory! What the hell is the deal? I couldn’t figure it out until today, when I realized something while staring at the box again. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Field Combat and Willow

Field Combat didn’t work.

Willow did work, although I kind of wish it didn’t. We saw the movie Willow in the theater when I was a kid. I haven’t seen it since then. Is it still good? The game’s not. Isn’t Capcom a videogame maker of some renown? How did they mess this one up? I will say this: The graphics, drawn in a style that looks like a colored pencil sketch, are impressive. Less so the rest of the game, an overhead-action RPG in the Secret of Mana style but with flaky combat mechanics and endless rooms full of nothing.

A Bunch of PC Engine CD-ROM Games

Some people have weird collecting habits. For example, apparently some folks take all the instruction manuals out of their games and, I don’t know, burn them? These games for the PC Engine CD-ROM system (known as TurboGrafx in the United States) were all in their original jewel cases, but with no manuals. As such, they didn’t even fetch 100 yen each — more like 50 yen.

Splash Lake is a clever puzzle game — you’re a bird-type thing, a pelican or something, on a series of small platforms out on the ocean. Or lake. Whatever. You have to peck at the platforms to get them to collapse, drowning your enemies, while trying not to kill yourself. The game’s menu features a color-bar test-pattern option, in case you … need to check your TV’s color levels. Helpful! And worth two quarters.

Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair, which like most of its brethren is available on Virtual Console, is quite different from the games that came before and after. It’s neither a straightforward platform game nor a nonlinear adventure. It’s actually more of a shooter. Each level is split into two parts. There’s an auto-scrolling platform section in which you run and jump and take out snails and cobras with a variety of projectile weapons. This is followed by an actual Gradius-style side-scrolling shooter section. Worth 50 cents!

Brandish is a top-down, dungeon-crawling RPG by Falcom with a bizarre graphic twist; Each time you rotate the direction that your character is facing, the entire game world snaps 90 degrees so you are always facing the top of the screen. Disorienting! And I couldn’t figure out how to actually fight anything. Didn’t give me my 50 cents’ worth.

Auleria is just as janky, but from the side instead of the top. It’s one of those RPGs with the Ys III vibe; killing things while walking to the right. Well, mostly they kill you. I spent some time (after the ridiculously long opening sequence) leveling up a little, and things got considerably more manageable, but not so much that I wanted to keep going. Pass.

Exile II is another in the side-scrolling RPG subgenre. I sure am glad I stopped to read the text, because this is fantastic: You play as a prince of a country in the old Islamic caliphate, and you heal yourself in battle by using drugs. (The store’s first shop sells cocaine, hashish, etc.) Cocaine gives you 10 HP. I love it. The Wikipedia entry lists a lot of the other story elements (you fight Christians!) that were scrubbed clean from the U.S. series. Worth 50 yen just for that.

The Lord of King and Rollerball

Speaking of Christians: If Jesus is King of Kings, and also Lord of Lords, then who is the Lord of King? Apparently it’s Fabio. The art and title sold me on the game, but unbeknownst to me I’d already played it before: The Lord of King is Astyanax, that wonderfully crappy side-scrolling platform game from Jaleco. This is the touching tale of a high school student who has to go fight monsters and ends up hooking up with a fairy.

Apparently the box art, which looks absolutely nothing like the gawky main character in the actual game, was based on the arcade version. Worth 100 yen, kind of. Not really.

Definitely worth it: Rollerball, which by pure coincidence is the second HAL Labs-developed video pinball game in this pile. Not as playable as Revenge of the Gator, but still fun.

3 Awful Super Famicom RPGs

I really figured I could roll the dice on these games and maybe find one winner among all of them. But Down the World is barely a videogame. Wikipedia is underselling it when it says the game’s first 15 minutes are noninteractive. It was more like 20 or 25, and even after that it’s barely even something you play versus just watch.

Farland Story is pretty much a Fire Emblem rip-off but worse, and Ruin Arm is an action RPG that I just had to turn off after fighting a couple enemies. If you spot any of these games at your local Japanese game store, run away.

What the Heck Are These?

“Do you know what these are?” I asked the clerk as I pulled these out of the junk bin at the front of the store.

“No,” he said, which is Japanese for, “Yes, but I can’t tell you.”

So I bought them. Wouldn’t you have? Two matte-black Famicom game cartridges with switches on the front, stickers covering up holes in the carts and faded, handwritten labels that look a couple decades old?

A little research later, we’d figured out what I’d acquired for 100 yen each: Rewriteable cartridges, used with pirate devices like the Famicopier. There’s an explanation of these things over at GameSniped. The switches flip between two different video modes, and the stickers cover up the EEPROM chips so they won’t be accidentally erased.

Whoever owned these things used them to copy two common Famicom games — Obake no Q-Taro and Ninja Hattori-kun. For sheer novelty value alone, worth the $2.